Entries Matching: Kirtsaeng

Today, a group of public interest organizations, including Public Knowledge, launched a petition asking the Obama administration to affirm the concept of ownership rights—the idea that consumers should actually fully own the things that they buy.

This may seem like a fairly obvious concept not in need of affirming, but the fact of the matter is that increasingly bizarre interpretations of copyright law threaten to make it illegal for you to sell, lend, or give away many of the things you own.

It looks like we’ll soon know whether the Supreme Court will help referee an increasingly common fight between publishers (and other distributors and manufacturers) and consumers who sell or give away their used copies of books, music, games, and basically anything that contains a copyrighted work. Publishers and manufacturers want to be able to control—or stop—sales of used goods, while consumers want to be able to dispose of their own physical property however they see fit. What the Court chooses to do could have enormous ramifications for consumers and businesses across the country that sell or lend copies of copyrighted goods, from books to toys to automobiles.

Today Public Knowledge, along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and U.S. PIRG, filed a brief asking the Supreme Court to review a lower court decision in the case John Wiley & Sons, Inc. v. Kirtsaeng on used textbook sales that could have enormous ramifications for consumers and businesses across the country that sell or lend copies of copyrighted goods, from books to toys to automobiles.